


A Day in the Life

by SegaBarrett



Category: Evil Dead - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-27
Updated: 2017-04-27
Packaged: 2018-10-24 12:59:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10742190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Ash, Cheryl, and Annie try to deal with the aftermath.





	A Day in the Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Missy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Evil Dead and I make no money from this. 
> 
> A/N: I am not entirely sure when this takes place - it's in a sort of present-day verse that is also not long after the movies, if that makes any sense. 
> 
> Warning: A few references to the whole tree situation, but nothing explicit.

“If you’ve been to certain areas where fungal infections are common, please stop taking…”

“Ashley, please shut up.”

Ash Williams looked up at his younger sister and curled his lips into what one could term a man-pout. His running commentary, he was quite sure, had been helping the situation, though Cheryl didn’t particularly agree.

He marveled, for a moment, at the fact that despite everything that had happened, she still felt the need to call him “Ashley”.

“But seriously. I think that these medications could have been what conjured up the Deadites this time around. I mean, look at some of these warnings, Cheryl.”

“I seriously doubt we’re going to find the answer in a commercial on the CW, Ashley. I mean, shouldn’t we be out doing more? Like, raising awareness about this being a problem, or… or, something?”

“Who would believe us, Cheryl? I mean, you got… I’m not even sure what the proper terminology…”

Cheryl put her hand up, coming perilously close to smacking Ash across the face.

“We’re not going to talk about the tree thing. I already told you. And you’re moving the conversation into something else to avoid answering what I just asked you. I hate when you do that, I really hate it!”

“Well, don’t get mad at me about the whole thing, okay?” Ash said with a shrug. “I’m just glad that we got out of it alive. But now we need to figure out what we’re going to do next. Like you said… they’re not going to let us leave. Ever. They’re going to follow us around, ever since we played that damned tape. We never should have done that.”

Ash tried not to think of them, but he couldn’t help it. Scotty, with his arm draped around Shelly, laughing. Linda, smiling at him like he was something… like he was anything. 

It had been a long time since he had felt that way. 

Why had they played the tape? If he could go back in time and tell them to stop it, to turn it off…

Cheryl had been the one to tell them to do that, and they hadn’t listened. Maybe it was because Cheryl had seemed so small, then – because she was always getting frightened of things and of people. Because she didn’t “speak with authority”, whatever that meant. No one in that group had really listened to anyone except Scott, after all. He had ruled the roost, the cock of the walk. 

And now he was dead, along with all the others.

Their friends were dead.

Why had the Williams siblings been lucky enough to escape? Not unscathed, of course – but they had escaped… 

“Ashley. You’re not even listening to me.”

Ash’s head jerked up, and he looked at his sister. When had she gone from a spindly little annoying thing to… whatever she was now? To say she was “a woman” or “blossoming” or something along those lines was far more Flowers in the Attic than Ash wanted to go, but she was certainly… different. She had grown up and gotten… harder. Colder, than the Cheryl he had grown up with for so many years. And he hated that it had come about because of this, because of that horrible decision to go take his friends up to the cabin. 

Because of the horrible decision to play that tape and curse their lives forever.

“I’m listening, Cheryl,” Ash said. He sounded more tired than he wanted to, but he was tired. Tired and done and burnt out and over and done with the whole thing. 

“So what’s our next move? If you’re listening?”

“We kill them all.”

***

Professor Raymond Knowby had been a quiet man, especially by the end. He hadn’t been one to say a lot, or even say a little.

Sometimes he could go for days at a time not saying anything at all. And his wife had accepted it, because it was part of the price that one paid to be an archeologist’s wife.

And Annie had paid the price of being an archeologist’s daughter. The ultimate price; she had become one herself.

Another silent, brooding archeologist after the great discovery that would make or break her. She had spent the better part of college bagging, tagging, and staring at things that were the equivalent of finding Civil War dental floss and hoping that the next one would be it; the next one, the next one. If she didn’t think about the next one, she would burn out, walk away and next come back.

And then they had found the Necronomicon. Well, he had. She had been away at school bagging and tagging, missing the great discovery as usual and feeling as if she was being sent up to her room again as the adults spoke. 

She had rushed back after receiving a message that she needed to come home, needed to be involved – that this may have been the greatest discovery her father had ever made. That he wanted her to be a part of it.

She had felt that for the first time, her father was proud of her – and it had been about something she hadn’t even been home for; try figuring that out. 

When she had arrived, it had been to discover that she had become an orphan overnight. It didn’t all hit her at first, of course. That wouldn’t have been scientific. 

Instead, it had eaten her from the inside out. Like bacteria.

***

Cheryl could remember that she used to draw. She used to pick up beautiful landscapes and find them in her mind’s eye and use them to deal with the fact that her entire life had been a mess from start to finish. Her parents had never been happy together – that much she had known for as long as she could remember.

She could also remember always feeling afraid. 

Then she had gone to the cabin, and she had noticed it first. The lurking evil in the place, that had the power to open cellars and rush inside people and even take control of the forest.

When she had come home, she wasn’t afraid anymore. But now, she was determined.

“We’re going to fight these things,” she told her brother, even though she had no idea what that would even look like. When had she ever fought anything in her life?

But she had made it out of the cellar, hadn’t she? She had made it out of the forest, hadn’t she?

So maybe… maybe there was still a chance for the two of them. 

She sat cross-legged on the floor of their home. Their father was out – out where, she wasn’t quite sure (probably at the bar), but out, blissfully. This wasn’t a story that he would believe, and not a story she had any interest in telling him again.

They’d thought that something had happened to the two of them – something that they had been too traumatized to recall. Or they had thought that it had been Ash and Cheryl who had done it all.

Join us, something still whispered in her ear, every time she tried to fall asleep.

Sometimes even she thought she might have killed them. 

Scotty, Shelly, and Linda.

Shelly and Linda had been nice, but she hadn’t been a part of their little group. Only two years younger, but she had always felt like a little sister in every sense of the word. Only invited along so that Ashley wouldn’t feel guilty about leaving her behind. 

“Let your sister tag along.” And it had extended into adulthood, with them attending the same college. Maybe that had been her mistake; maybe she should have chosen to go somewhere else, should have forged a life completely separate from her brother.

Maybe she had just standing in his shadow, still. 

But Ashley had been her friend, her only companion. The one who had always listened to her, even when everyone else thought that what she was saying was stupid. Maybe Ashley didn’t even believe it, but he would respect it.

Because it had been Cheryl who said it. Because he loved his little sister.

But the others… they had been full of life not so long ago. Scott had been such a jerk and she had hated him sometimes, but she had liked him, too. Even had a tiny little crush on him, not that she would ever say.

“We have to figure out how to destroy the book, I guess,” Ash told her. “That’s probably the only way to get rid of them for good. That’s where they came from in the first place, right?”

“I don’t know.” Cheryl paused, letting her eyes slip shut as she remembered the first night in the cabin. “They were there when we got there. Before we ever played the tape. I could tell they were there.”

“But they were left over from Professor What’s-His-Face, then. I think we’ve ended up in a chicken and egg kind of situation here, Cheryl.”

“It doesn’t really matter where we start, Ashley. But we need to start somewhere. Every second we sit around wondering… I think this thing gets closer to us.”

***

And it did. Because it was only a week after Cheryl got home that she began to have what she referred to in her mind as The Dreams. Dreams that seemed so real, too real, that they had to either mean something or be the evil spirits’ way of taunting her even after she thought they had gotten away for good. She pictured herself escaping one cage to discover that she was trapped in another and another, going on, like Russian nesting dolls.

In The Dreams, there was always blood everywhere, a red filter coating everything from the floors to the walls to herself. She couldn’t wash it off, no matter how hard she tried. It was caked deep into her skin. Maybe this was how Lady Macbeth had felt, covered in blood that no one else could see.

She wondered how long it would take Ashley, if she told him, to turn that into some kind of period joke.

She almost wished he would. It would make it all less real.

She tried drawing about it, sketching the images that came into her mind. She read somewhere that writing or drawing about trauma would help – though she didn’t think that this was the kind of trauma they had had in mind when they made that recommendation. 

She found herself drawing that book, over and over again. And eyes that stared off into space.

And blood. She had used up three red markers already. She couldn’t stop painting blood all over everything.

She needed it to stop. Needed it to all mean something. Needed to have a purpose.

Maybe that was what the dreams were telling her; she wished she knew.

Maybe she wasn’t meant to be one of the ones who walked away from it all – maybe that was what it was telling her.

That it had all been one big mistake.

***

Ash felt like a little kid again, looking for monsters under the bed. It had been a long time since he had had that fear; since he had been allowed to have it.

His father had demanded that he grow up, quick. That he be a man. That he look out for Cheryl. There had been no place in that for Ash to be scared, or to second guess himself.

Which of course meant that Ash had second-guessed himself in every single situation he ever encountered.

The only person who didn’t second-guess him was Cheryl. 

And he would never let her down, or let anything happen to her. That was why he had to leave her behind, somewhere… But where? Where would she be safe from the reaches out these things, whatever they were exactly?

Where was too far for evil to chase them down and finish what it started?

He realized that that place that he was looking for may not exist. If the evil could hitch to any person, didn’t that mean it could take a bus, get on a plane? Travel at the speed of light? Where had it even been imprisoned to begin with, unless maybe it never had been… Professor Knowby thought he had unearthed it, but perhaps it had always been there, watching and waiting.

And maybe Ash had always been meant to be the one to run right up against it, to be shattered and downtrodden but still somehow standing over the corpses of the rest. Of his friends. Maybe when he had been born, there had been something in his chart or in his runes that said he had to be the one.

But why?

Why couldn’t it have been Scotty, he wondered. Scotty had been strong and tough and seemed to always know what to do in a crisis. Scotty had been the one who had dug their truck out of a ravine on pledge night back in freshman year, after all. If there was going to be anyone left at the end of the Apocalypse, it would be Scotty standing there holding a beer and going “What happened, you guys?”

And now Scotty was buried in a shallow grave in Michigan. What they had brought back of him, that was. And Ash could barely remember anything he’d learned about him that mattered.

***

Raymond Knowby had spoken into tape recorders more than he had spoken to his own family. Annie had sorted through stacks of tapes when her parents had moved to the cabin, and she had wondered if they gave some kind of insight into who he had been.

She had stared at them for hours, wondering whether to listen to them or not. It seemed a little bit like reading somebody’s diary while they were away, wrong somehow, or like walking in on someone while they’re in the shower and peeping at them.

Even though, in a way, that was what Annie did for a living. Went through people’s things and read their diaries and looked into their private affairs. It felt less wrong when they were dead a long time, though.

But now her father was gone, too. And in his place, tapes talking about demonic possession and the way to kill things that Annie had never dreamed could actually exist in the world. Things that never should exist in the world.

She had probably seen the last of that odd duck, Ash, and his little squirrel of a sister. And that was probably for the best. Maybe it had been her father’s fault that this thing had seen the light of day, but that didn’t mean she had to accept it. He was gone, gone forever, wasn’t that bad enough? Both of them were.

Yes, they had been distant, wrapped up in discoveries and notebooks and tapes, but they had been her parents, too, and it wasn’t as if she was going to be able to go to the store and get another pair of them dropped off.

A doorway to another world was what her father had promised – but she hadn’t had an inkling of how lonely that world would be. If she could give it all back and just be a nobody who never discovered a single thing, she would.

That was funny to remember, the way they had called her Annie Nobody in school. Kids had thought that one was hilarious.

She wondered if they could laugh again if they saw the things she had seen now. 

***

Love had saved him, once upon a time. He just kept thinking it, over and over, couldn’t get it out of his head as if it was a record and there was a needle in it that couldn’t get out of the groove. 

The necklace he had given Linda had knocked the book away in time to save Ash’s life, in time to bring back Cheryl. Or maybe it had only bought him time. Maybe he would look back when he was old and grey and wish he had perished in the same shallow grave as Scotty, Shelly, and Linda.

Beautiful Linda. She had never hurt a soul, she had never done anything wrong. She had always been kind and good.

Not that that was the reason Ash had decided to date her at first, of course. He may have been quiet at the time, but he hadn’t been “sensitive” or whatever the word they were tossing around for “ideal guys” these days. He had been quiet and selfish and superficial.

And Linda had liked him anyway.

***

Annie picked up the phone and looked again at the small index card she had written Ash Williams’ number on. 

She closed her eyes and thought not of Ash, but of the people she had lost at the cabin that day.

Two of them she hadn’t really known, hadn’t really even liked. But they had died; they had died bloody and horrible and because of her and the stupid Book of the Dead. She should probably feel worse about them – they hadn’t had anything to do with the whole situation at all; they didn’t really deserve it.

She could remember thinking that the worst had happened when she saw the bloodied chainsaw. That someone crazy had murdered both her parents; maybe some kids on drugs or something like that. Things like that happened a lot, didn’t they? People got high and broke into houses and tried to do crazy cult shit.

And then, within a split second and in only a few minutes of spoken words, it had gotten more horrible than she could have ever imagined.

The moment that she had realized that Ash and Cheryl were not crazy, or if they were crazy, then the four of them were, too. Some kind of mass hysteria, she had tried to tell herself, that happened too, across civilizations.

Only she could break it. Maybe these two had come to the cabin by chance, but she had been meant to be there. She had been chosen for this, maybe while she was still in the womb listening to her mother sing, “Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird…”

Maybe she was the only one who could undo the damage her father had let loose upon the Earth.

She opened her eyes and closed them again, tried to pick up the phone but found her hands shaking. 

She hadn’t saved the world. Maybe she wasn’t the chosen one. She had opened a portal and then… then… 

***

Cheryl sat down outside her house and tried not to burst into tears. She could remember being a scared kid – when had a scared kid grown into a scared woman, and who the hell was she now?

These things – the Deadites – they wouldn’t die unless she and Ash were around to kill them. 

But if the world were relying on her, the world was probably going to be shit out of luck.

She stood up and began to walk, quickening her pace, wanting to run somewhere, anywhere… 

She looked up and realized that she had come to a clearing. A clearing filled with trees. 

Cheryl could feel her pulse racing, her heart beating. What a stupid thing to get upset about, that’s what other people would say if they were there. Well, Scotty at least.

But Scotty wasn’t there to mock her anymore. Scotty was dead.

And she was alone and surrounded. She wished she could look everywhere at once. Maybe it was time to turn around and start walking back… 

It was silly, stupid to be afraid – after all, what were the chances of it happening again?

Then again, Cheryl knew what it was like to be afraid of things that could happen, had happened, might happen. She paid attention to the news, to handprints and to scare stories. Her mother hadn’t told Ash to be careful about people snatching him off the corner, but she had been sure to tell Cheryl.

“A little girl was kidnapped just three days ago,” she would always say, or five days ago, or two days ago. “That’s why you never go with strangers.”

But Cheryl hadn’t been with strangers; she had been with her friends. And the evil hadn’t looked like a stranger – it hadn’t even had a form at all.  
Cheryl didn’t want to ever be afraid again.

She didn’t know when she started kicking and punching the tree, but a few minutes later her knuckles were bleeding and Ash was pulling her back.

She had nearly bit him when he cautioned her, “Wait! Cheryl. All right, I Spit On Your Stump, calm down!”

She wasn’t going to calm down, now – she was never going to calm down again.

But she was bleeding, she was bleeding, and it felt good.

Because she had finally kicked the shit out of something that would last an eternity. 

“Ash… I know what we have to do.”

***

Annie didn’t take the call at first, didn’t want to.

She knew who it was calling, of course. Who else could it be? Who else would call in the middle of the night but Ash and Cheryl, come to bring the night back all over again? 

She could just not answer. She could change her answering machine message to say that she had moved. She could unplug the line and walk away, pretend that these things had never happened or that it had all been in her head.

But that would be an Annie who hadn’t seen the things that she had. And even though she felt like she had lived through a horror movie, she didn’t want to be that girl who turned off her head and continued to try to live in the same rut, always only a step ahead of the killer.

For those girls, time ended whenever they weren’t pretty enough to stay on screen, or smart enough to resist their baser desires. That wasn’t who Annie was. Head over heart. But what about bravery? Was that something she had, too?

“It’s Annie.”

“Annie…” It was Cheryl’s voice on the other end. “We need you. Can you still do what you said? Open up the portal to end this once and for all?”

“I…” Annie began. She had been sure before, at the cabin, because she had to be. But now? When saying she didn’t know would end this, no matter how temporary? And what if she failed now? The consequences would be somehow greater, would be somehow more Earth shattering as she sat at this normal looking desk and pretended to be doing normal things like a normal person. “I can do it.”

“You’re sure now?” Cheryl sounded suspicious, reluctant.

Annie had to do it. For her father, for her mother – for everyone. For the person she would be, one day, and for everyone who she had lost. 

She had to do it.

***

“So what’s our plan? When we get back to… Wherever this portal is going to take us to?” Cheryl was cross-legged on the floor, head in her hands and trying to breathe.

“We kill them all. That’s really the only thing to do,” Ash said, using his good hand to stroke back his hair as he puffed out his chest. “You don’t have to come, Cheryl. You know that. You can just stay here and wait for me to get back.”

“For us to come back,” Annie corrected. “You’re going to need me along to make the portal you can use to come back… Remember?”

Ash sighed. 

“I was thinking of going this alone, from now on. You know, kind of the lone ranger sort of thing. A lot of people have died already… I don’t want you to be added to that list.”

“You can’t sit here and treat me like a victim, Ashley!” Cheryl snapped. “Just because I’m your little sister doesn’t mean that you need to try and protect me. And you didn’t do a very good job of it when you tried to, anyway!”

Cheryl regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth, but that didn’t matter – the damage had been done. Ash was so often unflappable, caught up in a quip and seemingly untouched by everything that had happened to them; it was easy for her to think that was really the case.

But she should know better, should know her brother better. She should know where the fleshy part was and not to poke it, but yet that was what she had just done.

“We should stop fighting,” Annie told them. “If we do this when we’re up against actual… whatever those things are, exactly, then they’re going to make pretty short work of us. So… you need to quit it.”

“I’m quitting it. You tell him to quit it,” Cheryl grumbled.

“Let’s just focus on making this portal. The sooner we get rid of the evil, the sooner we can try and go back to our regular lives and just ignore each other.”

“That’s a ringing endorsement for a second date,” Ash quipped, and both the women ignored him.

“Please get started, Annie, before I punch my lovely brother in his stupid face.”

Annie began to open the locked box she had brought from her apartment. It was as if an oppressive heat dove from the box and pushed against her, willing her to not be courageous enough to pick it up, to say the spell.

But she would have to, she would have to.

For them.

She willed her voice to speak.

And suddenly everything was flying. Everything was flying, and they were too.

***

When Ash awoke, the first thing he realized was that it was painfully hot outside. 

That, and he had collapsed into sand. Hot sand. 

The side of his face was burning, and as he lifted himself up, he let out a small grunt. He looked back and forth to see that the two girls (women, he had to tell himself – if they were in this situation with him, their time of being “girls” must have left a long time ago) on either side of him, already standing with swords raised.

Where the hell had anyone gotten a sword? Why was he always the last to know these things? 

He heard the sound of sand crunching, as if the world’s largest cat was scraping at its litterbox (perhaps, he mused, a jaguar or something like that). 

Then he saw them – all of them. There were men in armor converging around them, step by step, and Ash didn’t know what to do about this; he was becoming more and more certain that his brain was breaking into tiny bits and dissolving out his ears.

Because this looked like a period porno he had seen once, except he was pretty sure the ones about to get fucked were the three of them. 

“I’m only going to say this once!”

Ash stared up, trying to figure out who had spoken, for his eyes had to be deceiving him – it couldn’t be his little sister Cheryl standing up in the midst of them, holding a shotgun above her head and glaring at the crowd with a fire he had previously only seen her direct at a boy who had pretended to ask her to a dance.

Ash couldn’t help it; he was more than a little frightened.

The Deadite came out of nowhere, and Ash was not prepared for it.

He ducked, for that was his first instinct – to cover his head and his ears and to get down as low to the ground as possible. He was low enough to the ground to see the Deadite rip the head off of one of the men who was wearing armor.

He screamed, or tried to – no sound came out, and Ash wondered if maybe in all the time travel, he had lost his voice. Was that something that could happen? Time-travel related laryngitis? It seemed as likely as anything else that had been going on recently.

He lowered his eyes, then. He didn’t want to see any more carnage – there had been far too much of it already and he was never going to be able to block any of it out. It would be with him until the end of his life; he knew that much.

There was a sudden crash, and he raised his eyes, then – maybe there was something in him that just had to see how this would all turn out, who would come out on top. He couldn’t be afraid anymore; that old Ash must be dead and buried now, to allow for a new one to take his place. One that could be better, stronger, and faster. One that would have to be.

But not yet.

Cheryl was firing a shotgun, and she had made a Deadite’s head burst apart. Cheryl was killing them all.

***

“My name is Sheila, and I’m going to help you.”

Ash watched as the beautiful brunette floated along the floor. She had a long, white dress, and Ash had never seen someone who looked so beautiful. 

A nightmare hidden in the middle of a dream.

She was tending to Ash’s wounds, to every scar on his head and on his legs and around his neck. 

She kissed him on the forehead.

“Maybe I’m not the Chosen One,” he mused, “But this could be…”

It was never going to be the way it had been with Linda, he knew that. He would never feel the same rush, the same excitement, the same feeling that everything would be beautiful and shiny as long as they were together.

“You’re my Chosen One,” she told him. “I feel same when you’re near me. You keep us all safe.”

“I don’t do that.”

It was true. Annie did the spells; Cheryl did the fighting. What did he do, again?

He asked her.

“You are the beauty,” Sheila told him, moving to sit in his lap. “You are all of the beauty.”

Ash smiled. He looked at his hands, and he let out a long sigh.

He could live like this, if he had to. Cheryl said they would have to stay until they were all gone. 

Until the world was safe. That might be until the end of time.

Cheryl was ready; Annie was, too. 

Ash didn’t have much to go back to. But here…

Here, he had everything he could need.


End file.
